Trump should serve as a warning to all of us

I haven’t been even a little coy about my contempt for Donald Trump. He’s a tiny-handed, narcissistic, man-child still seeking his daddy’s approval and ruining our country in the process. But, he can do something positive for us. He can show us all how living a life filled with expectation leads to unhappiness.

It’s my belief that the happiest people are the people who have learned to live with no expectations. They don’t expect life to be easy, they just expect it to be what it is. Life isn’t fair. It’s not easy. It’s not filled with happiness all the time.

However, Trump and people like him expect that life will just unfold before him perfectly. I don’t know if it’s how he was raised (but I suspect so), but he acts like he expects everyone to just do what he wants them to. Like he’s what the world revolves around. He expects that his worldview should be or is the dominant worldview. He expects that money should get him whatever he wants. I mean, maybe it got him his wife, but I don’t think that’s working out for him as well as he expected it to.

And that’s the problem. Expectations rarely work out the way we think they will. We see things from our limited perspective, discounting the people around us, who all have their own motivations and expectations. We also can’t predict the world of larger events – things like natural disasters, the criminal or nasty intentions of others.

Our expectations also imply that we know what’s best on the grander scale. When we get focused on a set of ideas, and it blocks us from being able to see other possibilities. These possibilities could bring us rewards we never dreamed of because we couldn’t comprehend them, but we’ll never see them because expectations clouds our vision. It’s truly sad for us.

Because Trump has expectations, he acts out of fear that the expectations will not be fulfilled. Acting out of fear is rarely (I would say never) a good idea. It’s more short-sighted than allowing life to unfold, which means precluding a whole series of other potentialities. Fear is the greatest liar in our lives. Nothing cuts us down faster than fear.

And we can see what it’s doing to the United States. Fear leads to unrealistic nationalism, racism, homophobia, etc. It’s not the United States I love so much. It’s not a United States with possibility. It’s backward-looking and limiting. With our resources and population, we should be leading the world in science, technology, mathematics, economics, etc. But we’re not. Until our Dear Leader gets his head out of his ass, we’re going to continue to skid, out of control, backwards, to an era where equality was a dream.